Swizz beats gives his take

Having been linked to the (now closed down) file-sharing site MegaUpload, producer Swizz Beats gives his opinion on the future of the music industry and blames greed for the lack of progress towards what he feels is an inevitable shift towards artists and consumers interacting without middlemen.


From Torrentfreak:

“You know what I was doing – I was giving artists 90% of the shit.”

Beatz was referring to Megabox, a project Kim Dotcom said would put the “dinosaur record labels” out of business. The plan was to give consumers free access to music, financed through the use of an advertising browser plug-in.

The big difference as far as the music industry is concerned is that with the Megabox setup the labels wouldn’t be taking the lion’s share of the revenue as they do now – Megabox would take 10% and the remaining 90% would go to the artists. That leaves 0% for the suited middle men and as the theory goes, they were very unhappy about that.

A history of...Creative Copyright

Current affairs - Copyright law
Social Concerns - Internet Piracy
Cultural identities - Hip Hop/Remix culture

These are issues I have been following carefully for years and is an area of particular interest for me as a creator of content. Societies have always functioned by building on the work of the past to create its own unique culture. This is the very nature  of creativity. We live in a time where copyright law has become so powerful and all-encompasing that some argue it actually limits the right of creators.

Some resources to get me started:

Films:
// On Copyright:
RIP: A Remix Manifesto
Good Copy Bad Copy
Steal This film (Part 1 and 2)

// On Hip Hop
Scratch

Books:
Free Culture by Laurence Lessig

Artists:
(music)
Girl Talk

(film)
Cassette Boy
Adam Curtis

(Design)
Mark Weaver